[UPDATE: Just FYI, I changed the links below to a new version of the video with better audio.]

My love of time lapse night sky shots is on record (see Related Posts below), and I was all set to point you to this simply stunning video that’s been making the web rounds the past couple of days, showing the sky circling above the Very Large Telescope observatory in Chile…

… but then I found out that Youtube user bulletpeople took that video and manipulated it a little. He changed the point of view a teensy bit, just a scosh, so that instead of the sky moving around us in a geocentric fashion, the Earth rotates under the sky:

[Set the resolution to 720p and make it full screen for the best effect.]

How cool is that? I won’t say this frame of reference is more real than our usual everyday geocentric one*, because no frame is more real than any other. But it does give you a little bit of cosmic perspective, doesn’t it?

Don’t ever forget: we live on a tilted spinning ball revolving around a star that’s orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy that’s on the outskirts of the Virgo galaxy cluster that’s part of the Local Supercluster that’s in an expanding Universe that not only gets bigger every second but gets bigger faster every second.

That’s a lot to handle, I know… but it’s real, and it’s true, and it’s awesome.

Have to admit that I had a lot of trouble accepting Dark Energy, but with recent observations and reading “The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality” by Richard Panek – I’ve been convinced – I’d recommend that book to anyone interested in learning the history of the quest.

“but it’s real, and it’s true, and it’s awesome.” Real and true certainly. The evidence supports those assertions. ‘Awesome’ though is just your subjective opinion. You could just as easily say that the fact that our universe will inevitably end in a thin, dark haze barely above absolute zero sucks.

I have been doing that (manually) when I watch these. I cock my head and shift my body to try to match the rotation to get a sense of the true movement.

It’s true it doesn’t matter how you view it, but if you’re seeing something that is a billion light-years away rise in the east and setting in the west and showing up in the east again 24 hours after it last appeared there…how fast would it need to be going… I guess that’s pretty easy to figure out actually C=τr, C=6.28ly, 6.28ly/24hr=5.53754683×1015 mph.